Now that I'm sure everyone who is going to comment has read the interview, I wanted to get a discussion going on the requirement of the a Silver Medal Achievement for queueing for LFR/LFD in WoD.

2 cents? I think forcing people to have at least a basic understanding of their class and spec is nothing but a good thing. If the Proving Grounds are anything to go by, Silver should be pretty incredibly accessible for most players, given it's lower barrier of difficulty.

I think there is a lot of good to come from forcing people to at least have a basic idea of what they're doing before interacting with the community as a whole. I think it has a lot of potential to fix the the LFR/LFD system of 20-30% of the group effectively not contributing at all.

What are everyone else's thoughts?

EDIT: After reading through 10 pages, please keep it Civil guys, no need to resort to personal attack. We don't want the discussion locked.

To at least get everyone on the same page in terms of information, since a summary of a translated version of a translation of a few sentences in a single interview may not be the best foundation for a 24-page discussion, here's an overview of our current thinking:

We will have Normal and Heroic versions of our max-level dungeons. (Note that we did not have Normal level 90 dungeons in Mists.)

There will be no special requirement other than basic level/ilvl requirements on queuing for Normal dungeons or LFR.

Level-up quest gear will get you into Normal dungeons/scenarios, and Normal dungeon/scenario gear will get you into LFR.

Heroic dungeons will be more challenging than the Normal version (not brutally difficult, mind you -- just somewhat more demanding).

You will need a Silver Proving Grounds medal in a given role in order to queue for random matchmaking for a HeroicWarlords dungeon. If you form a premade group, you can zone in regardless and no such requirement applies.

In the past, challenging content and random matchmaking have often not gone so well together. Relying on item level does nothing to prevent a random group from getting, for example, a tank who may literally have never tanked before. Everyone has to learn somewhere, but we'd rather not have that learning come at other players' expense. One option would be to require a full premade group to do Heroic Dungeons, as we do with Heroic Scenarios, but that would present a very high barrier to entry (finding 4 other people with rigid role requirements is much harder than finding 2 other people with no role requirements). This solution represents a compromise in order to allow the content to see a broader reach via matchmaking, while minimizing frustration.

And yes, we realize that by formally using Proving Grounds as a qualification, it will be incumbent upon us to further refine their balance and mechanics. We'll be updating them for Warlords, and we're confident that we can make them a fair test of baseline ability within a given role.